It is estimated that one billion Valentine’s are sent every year on February 14th yet Valentine’s Day is one of the more mysterious celebrations that survive in the calendar. It emerges in the early Christian era in a few different guises. One was the “Christianization” of Lupercalia, the pagan festival of fertility which fell on February 15th and, among other traditions, involved a ‘love-lottery’ and the slapping of young bottom’s with strips of blood-soaked goats hide. Another guise was through the legends of St Valentine. Their are fourteen recorded Saint Valentines, all of them Roman martyrs. My favourite version is of Valentine, a third century priest, who secretly married young lovers in defiance of Emperor Claudius II's ban of marriage. Another possible source for Valentine’s Day was the English and French belief that the mating season (of birds) began on February 14th. The list goes on but whatever the origins of Valentines Day, the figure is romantic and the nature is sexual. It is not surprising that St Valentine was one of the most popular saint in the Middle Ages. 

While Valentine's Day sentiments survive from the fifteenth century, Valentine's Day cards became popular in the seventeenth century with  "printed" cards replacing the hand-made cards at the beginning of the machine age. In the 1840s the first mass-produced Valentine cards were sold in America by Esther A Howland. A card, purporting to be the oldest surving Valentine, belongs to the British Museum.

Gallery 19 stocks a small selection of hand-made Valentines Day cards. They comprise of 6" x 4" photographs by Alessia that have been hand-made into cards. The images are of grafitti lovers, chalk hearts, and padlocked bridges – the type of love you see  in the city today.  Happy Valentines Day!  

GALLERY 19 WILL RE-OPEN ON 16 JANUARY 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR

While we at Gallery 19 resent being told it's Christmas in October there is one Christmas item that is always in our windows before December. Christmas cards need to be selected, written and posted before the goose is ordered, the decorations are dusted off and the mad dash to Oxford Street for presents so that is why we make our Christmas card available in November.

Following the success of our Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Christmas card [see above] Gallery 19 has added two more cards to its collection - Kensington Palace framed by a beautiful winter tree and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens covered in snow. Both images are by Alessia and are available exclusively from Gallery 19.

It began, innocently enough, with a miniature model of a grand staircase bought over the internet by the director of Gallery 19. This staircase was placed in the window and sold immediately. The staircase arrived from New York yet the Dutcxh company who manufactured the model seemed to have an office in the UK. Enquires were made and a catalogue ordered through which we gained access to the wonderful world of architectural models.

Architects over the centuries have made models to check details in 3D and help clients understand dimensional perspectives just as set designers built models to realize – in miniature – how a particular stage production was going to look. Architectural models are an obvious extension to an architectural art gallery like Gallery 19 and we are now proud to stock a selection of staircase models - Grand, Spiral, Lighthouse and Mission - as well as handmade reproduction models after Renaissance originals such as the antique Bell Tower, a Dome and a Demi-Dome. All models are handmade and contain handcarved details. The cherry and birch woods are stained shades of light and dark honey and have a French distressed finish. These models make spectacular conversation pieces but can also be placed in quirky corners making a feature out of dead-space.   

Gallery 19 also stocks a selection of authentic reproduction globes to compliment its growing map collection. Centuries ago globes were made by gluing copperplate printed gores on a plaster finished papier-mâché core. The complicated gravure printing process has been replicated resulting in the sharpest lines, words and symbols even on the smallest size globe. All globes are made using original charts, reserched for their historical accuracy and visual appeal as well as highlighting some of the world's most famous cartographers: Mercator, Hondius and Vaugondy.

Another new addition to the gallery is the selection of classic obelisks from the Grand Tour era. Gallery 19 used to source beautiful marbelized obelisks from Florence but when our supplier disappeared the gallery decided to keep the few remaining obelisks it had – always on display, never for sale. Gallery 19 is overjoyed to have found these hand-turned wooden obelisks which we can display and sell.

It was a serendipitous chain of events which resulted in the newest additions to the Gallery 19 collection. As with anything that was meant to be, the models are what was always missing from the gallery but, already, it's as if they've always been here. Hope you love them as much as we do. See you soon.

The sixth oldest square in the capital and the first to be built outside the city centre, Kensington Square was the vision of Thomas Young, a wood carver and joiner of St Martin-in-the-Fields who, in 1682, bought fourteen acres of land in ‘ye parish of Kensyngtoun’. Originally called King’s Square, in honour of James II, Young’s plan was to develop a spare of fashionable houses in an area unrecognized by high society. This fact did not deter Young [or the builders Young leased and sold the majority of the sites to] and house-building began in 1685.   

By 1690 the north, east and south sides were largely complete. The south side did not then include No.’s 11 and 12 which lay just outside the square’s perimeter and were added in 1700. The north side lacked No.’s 36 and 37 while one the west side only No. 24 had been completed. [The west side progressed slowly; the last houses to be built – No.’s 34 and 35 – were not erected until 1736-7].  The garden plot is depicted – bordered by trees – in the earliest known plan of the square which is dated 1717. Stables were located on the east side of the square, through the archway next to No.’s 2 and 3, in what is now called Kensington Square Mews. The stables survived until the early 1870s; the southern end of Kensington Court now occupies this site. The Greyhound at No. 1 Kensington Square has been a public house since 1686, although the building was totally rebuilt in 1899. William Makepeace Thackeray, who lived at No. 16 Young Street, made good use of the Greyhound’s colourful clientele in his novel, The History of Henry Esmond [1852].

At least one house on Kensington Square was occupied in 1687 but by 1690 there were still only a dozen inhabitants, leaving thirty or so houses empty. It was the arrival of the King and his Court to Kensington Palace in 1689 that reversed the fate of the square and made it one of the most fashionable addresses in England. This came too late for Thomas Young who was ruined financially and imprisoned for debt. The square was abandoned once more when the aristocracy decamped after George III and Kensington Square remained relatively unoccupied until 1803. This gentle decline resulted in a lack of commercial development which has enabled Kensington Square to retain its eighteenth-century character and charm. 

Gallery 19 always displays a limited edition print depicting the four sides of Kensington Square in its window and the artist, Gordon French, is currently developing a new print that superimposes the four sides of the square over an old map of Kensington. Gallery 19 also stocks a charming card of Kensington Square by Matthew Wright as well as a fascinating out-of-print book titled, Records of Kensington Square by Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, who lived at 17 Kensington Square from 1918 until his death in 1946. 

One of the major contributors to the Gallery 19 look is our relationship with Italy. More than just a merchant of beautiful images and objects, Italy teaches and Italy inspires. In our experience, you cannot beat either the design or quality of something Made in Italy.

Gallery 19 has suppliers in Rome, Florence and Venice who we meet with on a regular basis and we are always on the look out for something exceptional to introduce into the Gallery 19 collection. Two years ago it was the calf-leather journals made in Florence and last year it was the hand-coloured reproduction engravings on antique paper which we found in Bologna and traced back to the workshop of two brothers in Oltrarno, the other side of Florence. This year – during a week in the Val d'Orcia researching a book the gallery is producing on a small chapel that sits on a hill between San Quirico d'Orcia and Pienza - we found something very special.

The discovery was a clump of cypress trees made out of wrought iron and welded onto a base made of mattaione, the local clay formed out of sediments of the Pliocene sea which covered the Crete Senesi between 2.5 and 4.5 million years ago. There was something exceptional about these cypress trees. The subject was nature yet the object was man-made and while the composition was age-old, something about the metal made it unusual and ultra-contemporary; a modern twist on art imitating nature. We were told this wrought-iron work was produced by a family of blacksmiths and were directed to their workshop in an industrial zone of the valley full of pecorino farms and terracotta factories.

The Biagiotti brothers are third generation blacksmiths. Grandfather Alfredo started the business at the beginning of the twentieth century and now his grandchildren work along side their father and young nephew forging both their original creations and perfect reproductions of period pieces from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Biagiotti's works are fully realized by hand in the traditional way – using fire and hammer – while all their hand-drawn designs and specifications are recorded in an old diary from 1991.

The term "blacksmith" comes from the action of 'smiting' [or hitting] the 'black' metal, either iron or its derivative steel. The black comes from fire scale, a layer of oxides that form on the surface of the metal during the heating process. After black the metal glows red, orange, yellow and white; then it melts. Colour is an important indicator of the metals workability; the ideal heat for most forging is the bright yellow-orange colour which is also referred to as "forging heat". When the metal is the right temperature it can be forged, welded, heat treated and finished.

Gallery 19 is very proud to introduce this traditional Tuscan craft to its collection. We have started with the cypress trees we first fell in love with - available as a clump or individually in three different sizes – but hope to introduce more wrought-iron pieces in the near future. We have also imported some exceptional hand-painted earthenware and hand-gilded reproduction coat-of-arms sourced from the shop we originally saw the cypress trees in. We hope you enjoy this little piece of Tuscany at Gallery 19. 

Have a great summer!

It was serendipitous that I stumbled across an article in The Times last weekend that brought my attention to the 200^th birthday of W.M. Thackeray. Serendipitous and – as I was hunting for something to write about in the first news post of the new Gallery 19 website – ridiculously appropriate; Gallery 19 is situated on the corner of Thackeray Street, around the corner from Thackeray’s house at 16 Young Street.

Thackeray enjoyed more fame in his own time then he does in our own. Born in Calcutta on the 18^th July 1811, the only child of a high-ranking secretary to the board of revenue in the British East India Company, he was sent back to England after the death of his father where he was educated at Charterhouse School among others. The next seven years were unsettled for Thackeray – he dropped out of Cambridge University after a year, traveled the continent, studied art in Paris and law at the Middle Temple [pursuing neither career] and squandered away his £20,000 inheritance on gambling and a series of bad investments. In 1836 he married Isabella Gethin Shawe, who gave him three daughters before having a complete mental breakdown and becoming known as ‘Thackeray’s mad wife’. With a young family to support, Thackeray decided to try his hand at “writing for life”.

Between 1840 and 1847 Thackeray wrote three hundred and eighty six pieces and three books for several magazines under numerous ridiculous pseudonyms such as George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Théophile Wagstaff and C.J. Yellowplush. Then in 1847 Punch magazine published Vanity Fair in serial form which made Thackeray a household name. Subtitled “a novel without a hero” and illustrated by Thackeray himself, Vanity Fair is a wickedly satirical panorama of English society in the early nineteenth century and arguably the greatest novel in the English language. The success of Vanity Fair ensured future bestsellers and Thackeray was ranked second only to Dickens. He also became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine.

After Young Street, where he wrote Vanity Fair, Thackeray never left The Royal Borough. At his daughters insistence the family moved to the more fashionable Onslow Square [a house Thackeray never liked] before building “the reddest house in all the town” at 2 Palace Green. After a lengthy bout of illness, Thackeray suffered a stroke on Christmas Eve 1863 and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery. He was fifty-two.

The Thackeray connections in Kensington do not stop with the man himself. He was survived by two daughters [the third died in infancy]. Anne Thackeray Ritchie lived in Kensington Square and was a successful writer herself while her sister Harriet “Minnie” Thackeray was the first wife of Leslie Stephen who, after Minnie’s death, went on to father Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; on the facade of 22 Hyde Park Gate are three blue plaques in a vertical row for Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The playwright J.M. Barrie – Kensington resident, creator of Peter Pan, and another Gallery 19 favourite – hero-worshipped Thackeray and told his daughter Anne that it was a shame he [Barrie] was born a generation too late to know the great man

If you want to see Kensington through Thackeray’s eyes read The History of Henry Esmond Esq, a historical novel in three volumes set in eighteenth century Kensington during the reign of Queen Anne. In The History of Henry Esmond Esq. you will find many characters Thackeray would have observed coming in and out of the Greyhound Tavern, situated opposite his house on Young Street. And if you happen to be in The Greyhound on the 18^th of July, raise your glass to No. 16 Young Street and wish W.M. Thackeray many happy returns.